During the pre-war period Donny Rumsfeld talked a lot about bringing democracy to benighted nations.  He also talked of "the old Europe".  Then, in part in response to the popular (democratic) sentiment of their people, the French and German Gov't refused to support U.S. agression, the U.S. Gov't got testy with them.  Now, as I predicted some time ago, large numbers of Iraqis are demanding a religious state.  

My question is, is imperialism compatible with democracy?  I say no, since the will of the imperialist power will always subvert the will of those who are under its thumb.

Comments?

Are you simply asking whether an empire can be a democracy, because we know it can't. Or is there a deeper meaning to your words?


Or need I ask? ;)

Although I can see where you're coming from, I'd say imperialism and empire do not have to be to the exclusion of democracy, but because of the way people behave, they almost inevitably will be.

I agree that Rumsfeld's comments do show quite a breathtaking inability to see how (oxy)moronic he is sounding to the outside world: for something done theoretically in the name of "democracy", or the "democratic world", there seems to be a staggering inability to actually go with the will of the people: IIRC before the conflict started, there was at best 50% support for the war in the US... and there wasn't another democracy which came near half that - even the US's supporters, the UK and Spain, were showing public opinion more than 75% against war.  

With what must have been well in excess of 95% of the World's population (the ones that actually knew what was going on, anyway) against a new conflict, what happens to democracy then?  Obviously, it gets ignored, we have a war anyway, with our leaders trusting that a speedy victory will allow a little bit of rewriting of history so that they could pretend everyone was behind them from the start.

Is it any wonder that people are trusting their leaders less, these days?  An interesting article: Is it all bad news on trust

Phil

From a purely semantic point of view...

Empire (from Latin imperium =  absolute) authority
1 : a major political unit having ... a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority

Democracy (from Greek dEmos = People)
1: government by the people

To answer the original question..

No, by definition, Empire/Imperialism is not compatible with democracy!

Possibly because we don't actually have democracy: we have some kind of representative dictatorship.  We vote for someone (or some party), then leave them alone to get on with the job, usually not being too concerned with what they're doing in our name.

I'm sure that's the sort of democracy our leaders would like to see elsewhere: the sort that by and large isn't that representative of the people, has almost total executive power and will have only a couple of parties so there's only two sets of people for us to deal with.  Much easier to keep control that way.

Phil